Holy Blood - Holy Grail, Socrates, and the world of Contradiction
Holy Blood, Holy Grail originally published in 1982 by Michael Baigent is one man’s quest to identify the true origins of what starts out to be a small mystery and turns into the journey to identify the beginning truths of Christianity. From the mountains of southern France to the shores of Israel, this book Chronicles the modern day manifestation of an ancient secret society, and makes educated guesses about the knowledge that has placed the society, during some centuries, as the right hand of the Catholic church, and in other centuries, the objective of the Great Crusades, as the entire western world attempted to destroy their entire lineage.
A modern thriller based on the academic writings in Holy Bood, Holy Grail is the Da Vinci Code written by Dan Brown. Fast paced and hard to put down, the Da Vinci Code weaves the knowledge discussed in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and makes it accessible to the masses through an thriller of heart pounding proportions. But as the book gets placed solidly on the New York Times bestseller list, it is always interesting to me how people digest the information.
Being interested in Transformation And Change, I am always drawn to paradigm shifting books, (and sure to be movies), and love watching them move through society. What they produce is a clear black and white choice based on a lot of gray area. The choices are; do I hold onto my childhood truths and regard this book as a work of fiction, or do I stand behind a new paradigm and shun the old. For most people in America, I often see at first many reactions, from “I knew it” to “this is fiction.” But what comes next? Is there a deep pondering, and if so what results. Do these religious earth shattering works actually create global change?
Continue reading "Holy Blood - Holy Grail, Socrates, and the world of Contradiction"
Posted by Mark | Comments (0)
Osho, Book of Wisdom
Man's greatest longing is for freedom. Man is a longing for freedom. Freedom is the very essential core of human consciousness: Love is its circumference and freedom is its center. These two fulfilled, life has no regret. And they both are fulfilled together, never separately.
People have tried to fulfill love without freedom. Then love brings more and more misery, more and more bondage. Then love is not what one has expected it to be; it turns out just the opposite. It shatters all hopes, it destroys all expectations, and life becomes a wasteland, a groping in darkness and never finding the door.
Love without freedom naturally tends to be possessive. And the moment possessiveness enters in, you start creating bondage for others and bondage for yourself, because you cannot possess somebody without being possed by him. You cannot make somebody a slave without becoming a slave yourself. Whatsoever you do to others is done to you.
This is the basic principal to be understood, that love without freedom never brings fulfillment.
And there have been people who have tried the other extreme, freedom without love. These are the monks, the escapists, the people who renounce the world. Afraid of love, afraid of love because it brings bondage, they renounce all the situations where love can flow, grow, can happen, is possible. They escape into loneliness. Their loneliness never becomes aloneness, it remains loneliness. And loneliness is a negative state; it is utterly empty, it is sad.
One can be a solitary, but that does not bring solitude. Solitariness is just physical aloneness, solitude is spiritual aloneness. If you are just lonely. . . and you will be if you have renounced the world. If you have escaped from the world out of fear, you will be lonely, the world will haunt you and all kinds of desires will surround you. You will suffer millions of nightmares, because whatsoever you have renounced cannot be dropped so easily.
Renunciation is repression and nothing else. And the more you repress a thing, the more you need to repress it. And the more you go on repressing it, the more powerful it becomes. It will erupt in your dreams, it will erupt in your hallucinations. People living in the monasteries start hallucinating, people going to the Himalayan caves sooner or later are no more in contact with reality. They start creating a reality of their own, a private reality, a fictitious reality. . . . .
On the one hand is the person, the worldly person, who has tried to find love without freedom and has failed. His life is nothing but a long, long slavery of many, many people, of many, many things. He is not free to have even a slight movement. That is one failure; the majority of humanity is caught in that extreme.
A few escape from the world: seeing the misery, they start searching the other extreme; freedom, moksha, nirvana. But they become neurotic, psychotic, they start living in their own dreams. Loneliness is so much that one has to create something to be with.
Both these extreme efforts have failed. Hence humanity stands on a crossroads: where to go? The past has utterly failed. All the efforts that we have done in the past proved wrong, led to cul-de-sacs. Now where to go? What to do?
Atisha has an important message to deliver to you. And that message is the message of all the Buddhas, of all the enlightened people of the world. They say: Love and freedom are not separate things, you cannot choose. Either you will have to have both, or you will have to have dropped both. But you cannot choose, you cannot have one.
Love is the circumference, freedom is the center.
One has to grow in such delicate balance where love and freedom can bloom together. And they can, because it few rare individuals it has happened. And if it has happened to only a single individual in the whole history, it can happen to every human being. It is your potential, your birthright?.
From: Osho, Book of Wisdom, Vol. II pp. 260-263
Posted by Mark | Comments (0)
